What Happens When Your Customer Loses Online Access to Your Business?

What Happens When Your Customer Loses Online Access to Your Business?

Wells Fargo customers recently suffered loss of online access to their bank accounts. Many report also losing access to their accounts via ATM as well. This situation causes inconvenience for some, and monetary harm to others. What will you do if your customer loses online access to your business?

This problem is not isolated to Wells Fargo. It can happen to any business that maintains online communications with their customers. If your business continuity relies on efficient online data exchange, you should consider not only how you protect against disaster or cyber-attack, but also how you limit the extent of damage caused by a disaster or cyber-attack.

What Happened to Wells Fargo?

Wells Fargo’s primary servers caught fire, causing the system to go down, affecting millions of customers. Disaster Recovery solutions exist that could have brought Wells Fargo back online very quickly. Apparently, Wells Fargo did not maintain a Disaster Recovery system with this level of protection against business continuity disruption. 

How This Situation Could Affect Your Business

How would a disaster that caused loss of access to your business’ data and links to your customers affect your business? Whether the loss of access is due to a natural disaster or a cyber-attack, or any other source, you need a Disaster Recovery Plan that will minimize harm to your business. Below we list a few common consequences that arise when disaster strikes and a suitable Disaster Recovery Plan and System is not in place.

Damage to Customer Relationships – We can imagine the reputation damage that Wells Fargo will suffer due to a delayed response to their loss of online access to their banking system. Your business may have different specific online access issues, but your reputation could suffer equally if your system downtime disrupts your customers business.

Loss of Sales – Some businesses depend on internet connectivity with their customer base to accept and process orders. If this scenario fits your business, how much sales loss will you suffer if you system goes down for an extended time? Elimination of this cost could pay for all or a significant portion of the cost of installing and maintaining a suitable DR system.

Cash Flow and Administrative Functions Interruptions  – Many competitive businesses rely on internet-based service to manage a wide range of cash flow and administrative functions. Temporary interruptions to online access results in processing delays and loss of focus on primary business functions during system repair and recovery activities.

How You Can Prevent Attacks and Damage When Attack Occurs

Businesses can deploy a wide range of measures to prevent cyber-attacks and to mitigate the damage when cyber-attacks occur or disaster strikes. Below we highlight a few key considerations for mitigating the severity of loss of access to your computing systems, including online access issues. 

Backup – When disaster strikes, if you do not maintain complete backup of critical data, you will lose data permanently. This situation can and has resulted in business failure.

Disaster Recovery – The potential for a disaster or cyber-attack exists, regardless the level of protection you deploy.  Disaster recovery takes many forms, each with distinct characteristics, providing different levels of protection and at a range of costs. The best Disaster Recovery solution for your business will balance cost vs. the level of protection needed to preserve business continuity, at a price you can afford. 

In addition to identifying and installing the best Disaster Recovery system for your business, you will need to test your disaster recovery plans and the associated infrastructure.

Risk Analysis – A key element of Disaster Recovery Planning includes Risk Assessment. This step of Disaster Recovery Planning helps your business make informed decisions for optimizing selection of the right DR system for your business.

This Seems Like a Lot of Work…Who Can Help?

Identifying the best disaster recovery plan and supporting infrastructure can prove a daunting task unless you utilize appropriate resources. Custom Information Services (CIS) maintains the expertise that enables them to help you simplify this effort at a price you can afford.